Harry I just read you newly posted short story. I really liked the description of the scenery and how you described some of the people.I liked the cliffhanger ending. Hopefully there's more to this story, if not I would consider adding some more to it!_________________It isn't the fame itself that makes you famous but what you do with that fame that does.

I swear, Linda ... nothing gets by you. You give all the secrets away.

No, I never studied creative writing. I studied literature for a while, just long enough to recognize what it was when I saw it. What rubbed off on me, I think, was the uncanny ability some writers had to make the reader see what the writer wanted him to see – and no more. It was very obvious in Hemingway Conrad and Cheever. A little less so in Faulkner, O’Connor and Updike and most times not at all in Hugo and Dickens.

All the good writers had leashes to keep the reader from wandering off on his own.

Thank you both. This is very much an opening and I'll have to do something with these people.

It’s that gratuitous adjective ‘creative’, stuck in the front of ‘writing’, why must it be there? If we start out to write something ‘creative’ I think we lose all the power prose can bring to a reader, and in the end we lose him in the swamp of our own digression.

I never looked at it that way, Harry...the word creative, I mean. I studied literature, heck, even before studying literature...as a child. I had a library card as soon as they would allow me one...read all of my life, but it wasn't until I studied creative writing (non-fiction, fiction, and poetry), that I truly recognized and appreciated both the talent and skill I saw in literature. Poetry came naturally, but, decomposing a piece of prose, well, it never occurred to me until after I studied creative writing.

Harry wrote:

... Look how you can write a story in six words ...

“For sale: baby shoes, never used.”

But, there's the secret:

Harry wrote:

... Look how you can write...

You're a natural, Harry. Most people, unless they have studied creative writing, while imagining the history, would never marvel at the fact that it only took six words to plant the seed._________________Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
-- Dylan Thomas